In part 3 of our video series “Marketing Ops New Full Funnel Support Mandate” discuss what B2B Buyers need and expect from marketing and sales ops to support and automate their buyers journey and their customer journey. We also discuss the need for a seamless hand offs to sales, customer service and account managers when Buyers are ready.
(Watch Time – 4:45)
Summary
What do B2B Buyers need and expect from Marketing and Sales Ops? Today’s B2B buyers want marketing teams to lead their buying process. When they are ready to buy they expect a seamless hand off to sales and post-sale they also expect digital education and even more personalized content during their adoption and customer journey. Organizations that embrace full-funnel automation are seeing stronger engagement, loyalty, retention and increased revenue as a result.
Transcript
What Do B2B Buyers Now Need and Expect?
So what do buyers now need and expect from your marketing and sales operations for an automated buyer’s journey and connected customer experience?
Top of Funnel: Building Awareness and Trust
The digital first buyer’s needs and expectations start at the very top of the funnel. To build awareness and trust, B2B buyers now expect multiple types and formats of content delivered in up to 5 channels. Most buyers now require between 10 to 21 or more touches before they’ll convert as an inbound lead.
The Long Buyer’s Journey
Now most inbound leads are not ready to immediately meet with sales. Most buyers now start their journey at least 3 to 12 months before they’re ready to buy. 54% won’t transact for over a year. 80% want to avoid your sales team until they’ve completed their research and are ready to shortlist. And 40% would prefer to avoid sales completely if possible
Middle of Funnel: Nurturing and Education
All these desires dramatically impact the middle of the funnel. Because according to Merkel, buyers now expect marketers and not sales reps to manage the first 65% of the buyer’s journey with digital education and lead nurturing campaigns. And according to Gartner, buyers now expect educational content and campaigns to support their purchase decision at every stage of the funnel, including awareness, consideration, and preference. And moving forward, buyers are also increasingly requiring that these campaigns and content are personalized for both campaign engagement and serious consideration of your solution, which dramatically increases your marketing team’s workload. Because today, the average B2B purchase decision includes 6 to 10 decision makers and influencers.
Bottom of Funnel: The Marketing-to-Sales Handoff
Next, at the bottom of the sales funnel, buyers now expect a seamless handoff from marketing to sales when they’re ready to buy, expecting sales to be enabled with prior engagement history and additional third party data. They don’t want it to feel overly invasive, but according to a survey of buyers, 74% of leads that have opted into GDPR and cookies expect sales reps to immediately add value enabled with a basic understanding of their company’s fundamentals in prior content, events, and email engagement. And marketing teams that provide their sales team these tools increase their win rates by 28%.
Post-Sale: Automation and the Customer Experience
And after these increased wins, buyers that become customers now expect automation and continued personalized digital engagement because B2B customers now state that a disconnected customer experience after the sale is now their number one frustration.
The same leading marketers that built mature sales automation are now extending automation to build digital customer funnels across multiple processes to meet these new expectations with profitable results. The 25% of companies that automate onboarding and training experience a 92% increase in adoption and an 88% increase in loyalty. Marketing teams that use it for continued education and event marketing with personalization see a 65% increase in advocacy. And the 20% of mature companies that are doing both are experiencing a 4x increase in retention. And finally, mature teams that are also deploying their tech systems for personalized cross sell and upsell see an increase in campaign engagement and a 60% increase in purchases per customer.
Summary: Marketing’s Expanding Role
So to summarize, marketing’s function and role is now permanently extended and much more complex because of this combination of B2B buyers and now customers’ digital first habits and desires for frictionless automated experiences with a seamless handoff to sales and customer service. Combined with the multiple financial rewards experienced when marketing supports full funnel automation is why Forrester’s senior analysts believe that for sales and marketing organizations to survive and thrive, B2B marketing leaders are now required to continue to quickly transform their organizations from lead generation and brand awareness with increased capability and capacity to support sales with continuous digital engagement across the entire sales funnel and customer life cycle, executing multiple processes, and increased use and optimization of automation technologies.
